Modeling manufacturing process variation for design and test

For process nodes 22nm and below, a multitude of new manufacturing solutions have been proposed to improve the yield of devices being manufactured. With these new solutions come an increasing number of defect mechanisms. There is a need to model and characterize these new defect mechanisms so that (i) ATPG patterns can be properly targeted, (ii) defects can be properly diagnosed and addressed at design or manufacturing level. This presentation reviews currently available defect modeling and test solutions and summarizes open issues faced by the industry today. It also explores the topic of creating special test structures to expose manufacturing process parameters which can be used as input to software defect models to predict die specific defect locations for better targeting of test.